Colossal Antarctic ice-shelf collapse followed last ice age

Study: 100,000 square miles of Ross Ice Shelf disappeared in 1,500 years

From RICE UNIVERSITY

HOUSTON — (Feb. 18, 2016) — In a new study that provides clues about how Antarctica’s nation-sized Ross Ice Shelf might respond to a warming climate, U.S. and Japanese oceanographers have shown that a 100,000-square-mile section of the ice shelf broke apart within 1,500 years during a warming period after the last ice age.

The Ross Ice Shelf is the world’s largest ice shelf, a vast floating extension of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that is about the size of France. But at the end of the last ice age, it extended much farther north and covered the entire Ross Sea.

A study in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences details how the ice shelf shrank during a period of climate warming following…